The weblog of Irfan Yusuf, bush lawyer, humorist and award-winning author, once a small-c conservative but now politically left right out. His often irreverent take on things appears in some newspapers in Australia and New Zealand and online. His comic memoir "Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist" was published in May 2009 and won the Iremonger Award for Public Issues Writing.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

COMMENT: Europe's demographic winter?

I haven't seen a white Christmas for years. Then again, I haven't held a handful of snow for quite sometime either. The last time I saw snow was during a flight from Christchurch to Sydney. Our Pacific Blue jet took us over some mountains (real mountains, not the Claytons mountains we have in Australia), whose peaks were snow-covered. Or was that just cloud?

Anyway, some far-Right fruitloops in the United States are warning of a nasty winter about to hit Europe. Apparently Europeans are being out-bred by nasty aliens of Middle Eastern appearance.

Salon writer Catherine Price cites a number of these conservatives as suggesting the only solution is to virtually force good European Christian women to have more babies.

Price provides a summary (well, not really) of an article first published in the March 3 2008 edition of The Nation. That article talks about the possible outcome if white Christian Europeans don't start throwing away the pills and frangers. Here is Price's spin on the message of the article:

The feared result would be a "demographic winter" where, to put it bluntly, Europe would run out of white people. By not having enough children, these doomsayers say, Western civilization is "laying itself down to die."

The solution is to take a leaf out of the cultural books of so many cultures practised by Muslim migrants. That means adopting socially conservative family values even if it means potentially curtailing gender rights. So the best way for us to beat those misogynistic "Mozlems" is to behave more like them. Or rather, to behave more like how we stereotype them.

Price continues ...

... American religious conservatives are trying to convince European secularists that to solve some of their demographic woes, they might want to rethink their position on women's rights. As author Kathryn Joyce explains, "The real root of racial tensions in the Netherlands and France, America's culture warriors tell anxious Europeans, isn't ineffective methods of assimilating new citizens but, rather, decades of 'anti-family' permissiveness - contraception, abortion, divorce, population control, women's liberation and careers, 'selfish' secularism and gay rights - enabling 'decadent' white couples to neglect their reproductive duties." They have, she explains, defied the biblical command to "be fruitful and multiply."

In other words, if those bloody "Mozlems" are going to have lots of babies, we should start doing the same. Which all sounds good and fine except for one minor point. As Muslim migrants move into their second and third generation, they tend to adopt the reproductive practices of their fellow Europeans. After all, they share the same economic, social and cultural conditions as their fellow citizens.

That means you won't be seeing a 3rd generation British Muslim lawyer or merchant banker in London having more kids than, say, a 3rd generation Irish Catholic lawyer of merchant banker in London.

There's another problem too. if you start encouraging people to have more babies, what happens when the wrong group start having more and more of them? As Price notes ...

... when Italy offered "baby bonuses" to families who had a second child, it revealed its racial motivations when it asked for refunds from immigrant families who had been accidentally issued checks (those weren't the types of kids the government was trying to promote). If I were an immigrant in Italy, I don't think that policy would make me feel too warm toward mainstream Italian society.

You are completely wrong when you say "..Muslim migrants move into their second and third generation, they tend to adopt the reproductive practices of their fellow Europeans..."

Look at any of the Bosnian muslim families who came here in the 50's. In the third generation they are still breeding like flies. Every muslim community attracts more and more muslims.

In all the French colonies including heavily European ones such as Algeria the muslims never adopted low French birth-rates. In the old Imperial Russia and Soviet Union muslim's never adopted low European birth rates and still haven't and never will. Turkey does not have low birth rates and it's supposed to be a European country. The black muslim community in the USA has high birth-rates. Your assertion is baseless.

Compare muslims with jews who keep their religion. Guess what. Religious jews have kept their high birth rates whilst living amongst Europeans. Same with religious Christians including the Brethren and Opus Dei whom you constantly condemn.

You know it is a lie postulating that the muslim birth-rate will go down. Especially when every muslim claims that Islam is the fastest growing religion in Australia, Europe and the whole world and the entire strategy of all muslims has always been for Islam to spread by holy war and breeding.

You think that your spin and propaganda is clever. That each lie and deception is clever. It is a stupid person who is proud to be sly and deceptive. A person so stupid that he takes everyone to be a fool also.

Why don't you just take an IQ test and then compare your IQ with your contemporaries who have made successes of their lives. Your problem is not just being mentally ill. Your problem is that you are also not very clever by comparison with non-muslims.